Every apprenticeship follows a national standard: a published description of what somebody in that role must know and be able to do. You are not designing a training programme — you are picking the standard that matches the job, and the rest follows from that.

You can hire someone new or put an existing employee onto a standard. Both are common. An existing employee has to be learning genuinely new skills for it to qualify, which rules out using it to certify what somebody already does.

Twenty per cent of contracted hours are spent learning rather than producing. That is the part employers ask about most, so to be plain about it: it does not have to be one day a week, it can be delivered in blocks, on site, or online, and time spent learning new skills while doing the job can count if it is planned and recorded.

Throughout the apprenticeship there are progress reviews involving the apprentice, us, and you. These are short and they exist to catch problems early, while there is still time to do something about them.

At the end, an independent assessor — not us, and not you — confirms the apprentice meets the standard. That independence is what makes the qualification worth something to the next employer, and it is why we cannot simply pass our own learners.